Travel Opportunities in Illinois

Illinois may seem like a lackluster state with nothing to offer but cornfields, suburbia, and corruption, but once you look past the drudgery of daily life in the land of Lincoln, you’ll find some great destinations. Here are just a few.

The hardware store

You probably won’t have to travel too far to find one of these. This is a great place to visit when you lost one of your wrenches and end up buying a 60-piece set, or when you really want to splurge and get one of those nifty water fountain faucets. You can also see various exciting “as seen on TV” products, such as a pillow for your iPad, or copper socks, for some reason. All in all, a great place to spend a Saturday afternoon before dinner at your uncle Joe’s farmhouse.

Shawnee national forest 

Calling all southern Illinois folks! Hello? Anyone? Anyway, this is a great place to visit if you want to experience elevations of over 800 feet above sea level, or if you’re a Disney villain looking for trees to chop down and small, marketable animals to scare. Some say that if you shout “I’m fishing without a license!” near Dutchman lake at exactly 3:00 PM, a mysterious creature known as the “park ranger” will magically appear! How whimsical!

Abraham Lincoln presidential library

Learn about the life of honest Abe at his very own presidential library in Springfield! This is a great place to visit if you want to see eerily-lifelike wax replicas of Lincoln throughout his life, or somber pictures of union soldiers taken outside of the regiment tent before a cannonball obliterates the captain’s horse at Chickamauga. Now you can learn about history without having to read 50 pages of direct sources!

Aurora Central Catholic High School

Seriously, I actually have no idea what goes on there. Sometimes I hear pop songs playing during their football games. 

Braidwood nuclear power plant

The Braidwood Generating Station is located to the south of Braidwood, IL, 60480. Power is generated by two Westinghouse pressurized water reactors authorized to run until 2046 and 2047, respectively. Along with the LaSalle county generating station, Braidwood provides much of the electricity for Chicagoland, so it would be a shame if anything happened to it. 

[Transparency notice: The author has accepted a $3,000,000 donation from BP, but is still committed to 100% unbiased writing that’s up to the rigorous The Acronym standards.]